Snapshots from the Tokyo-Kyoto Tour.

All this language learning, SRS talk and no how’s Matt and what’s he REALLY doing?

Japan!

Really, I should say I did a tiny fraction of Tokyo and and a bit of Kyoto and a bullet train in between. It was one week of an almost completely tourist adventure. I should emphasize that one unit of measurement, the week. It didn’t feel like seven days. Days and nights were one.  Every hour was different but the whole week was the same. Ramen meals were perhaps the only consistent ingredient in action packed nonstop attempt to experience a bunch ‘o stuff. I’ll run through it here  as I did in Japan  —>  Arrive Toyko,  find Ueno district, find crew and the hotel, eat at best ramen joint ever, wander  Higashi-Ueno market, see Sensoji Temple, see Five Storied Pagoda, eat sushi, wander Asakusa Market , visit Asahi brewery (no more), ascend Tokyo Tower…eat best ramen ever… cross the Shibuya crossing, all-nighting in Roppongi, eat best handcrafted mochi ice cream ever, check out Akihabara cosplay, sleep in a capsule, visit Kappabashi kitchen town, visit Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, watch  bustle of Tsukiji Fish Market… eat best ramen ever… tour Ueno Park and temples, ride bullet train, check out International Manga Museum, view Silver Pavilion, visit Samurai shops and manga store,  play video games, bike Kyoto,  tour Imperial Palace… eat best ramen ever…train ride back to Tokyo. And that’s maybe 1/3 of the trip, the highlights.  The highlight of the highlights for me, was the Imperial Palace in Kyoto with those sweet  nightingale floors and awemazing murals.  Impressive. I don’t have any interior pictures though. They wouldn’t let me take ‘em.

What about the stories in all that stuff? -Like how Cezar and I played human frogger at Shibuya crossing and lost Melodie in the mass of people and how she wasn’t so happy, and how and why my image of ramen is no longer Top-Ramen, and how dangerous it is to first look left when crossing  street, and what happens with you share beers with carnies? That’s for another time.

녹차
라테

We talked over lattes in in the town of Kimje . I told her I wasted my time for the first year of studying Korean. I spent all that time struggling,  trying to retain what I had learned and trying to output using grammar rules.  But she said, “No. You have what you have now because of that waste of time”.  “Okay”, I said. “You’re right.” Failing horribly forced me do find a better way.

Now, five months later…I’m moving right along with Korean. I’ve stopped with Korean Class 101 lessons last month. I got to the point where I learned enough sentence patterns to set me free from their lessons and dive into other material. Lately its been expression dictionaries. I occasionally run into strange grammar but most of the time now the new stuff I’m learning is vocabulary. I’ll probably go back to KC101 lessons in the future but for now I’m having fun without it.

Learning song lyrics is another thing I’m doing for fun. MC Snyper, Delispice, and Zitten are some of the Korean artists I find interesting. MC Snyper is way too fast to keep up with but still fun to listen too.

And the other day I found myself  watching a Japanese film that had Korean subtitles. I had to pause it often in order to read the subtitles, but I was happy I could even understand a little.

I have around 3500 cards in the Anki deck with  2700 in rotation,  and another 1000 or so waiting to be added. I kinda wish I had more  but I definitely have a limit to the amount I can learn in a day.

This final and upcoming month I will continue as I have done for the past five and perhaps do the Virtual Output Experiment.

“What? Learn Japanese?”, the Koreans say. Yes, Japanese. Well, only for a week. Last month I made a short visit to Japan. I didn’t have the time to learn how to read, and really I didn’t have a major interest in learning Japanese, so I only concerned myself with learning how so say 20 or so short phrases and words.

How did I study? Using SRS of course. 15 minutes a day for about a week, I practiced until I left for Japan. I registered for a free one week trial on Japanesepod101, skipped the podcasts,  and took advantage of the audio dictionary for the Survival Japanese. For the SRS cards, this time I put English text on the question side and the audio and phonetic spelling (side note: Hangul works very well for this) on the answer side.  When I got on the plane to the Tokyo a week later I tested it out with the flight attendant. I got a genuine smile for just saying thank you.

I want to comment on using SRS in this way. I’ve read on a few websites that going from L1 to L2 is wrong. I will happily disagree with that (for now at least). It worked just fine for my week of Japanese.

I believe the argument I read is that there is more than one way to translate going from L1 to L2 and babies don’t translate so why should we. What’s wrong with saying it a different way than what’s on the answer side of the card?  It’s even possible to write different possibilities so you can feel you’re “right” if you answer one of them. Or how about creating a deeper context to narrow the range of possible answers? “Hello [said to a close friend]” , for example. Babies don’t translate so why should we. I dunno. As an adult (and maybe as a baby) I think I have to. I have no facts or proof to back this up. I’m just going with my gut here. (See Steven Colbert)  It’s when I read more in Korean that I start to feel less like I’m translating. The easier stuff I just know, but the harder stuff i have to think about it, mix stuff around in my head in English and then finally understand. So if I’m translating anyway, going from L2 to L1, and it’s okay to have multiple answers, why would it be bad if I went from L1 to L2?

I get the (gut) feeling that going from L1 to L2 is really like outputting. The question side of the card in English presents the context and the idea to convey, and I must come up with the output in Korean. I’m totally for Virtual Outputting if its fun. Check out this on the spot truthiness.

Input

• Koreans: 1)Korean –> 2)understanding
• English speaking peeps learning Korean: 1)Korean –> 2)English –> 3)understanding
  Then after lots o’ repetition, English speaking peeps learning Korean, input more  like Koreans. The English becomes unnecessary.

Output

• Koreans: [input to respond to]  –> 1)idea formulated –> 2)Korean
• English speaking peeps learning Korean:
  [input to respond to]  –> 1)idea  formulated –> 2)English –> 3)Korean
  Then after lots o’ repetition, English speaking peeps learning Korean, output  more  like Koreans. The English becomes unnecessary.

Virtual Output

• Me, an English speaking peep learning Korean:
  [English input]  –> 1) idea  formulated–> 2)English –> 3)Korean
  Then after lots o’ repetition I output more  like Koreans. Stage 2 translation becomes unnecessary.

Now I have another project, The Virtual Output Experiment.

Here’s a cool explanation. http://www.xamuel.com/spaced-repetition-systems/

The following bit caught my attention. The guy is experimenting with SRS and listening to music.
“Basically, if you listen to the same song over and over, it gets tiresome. And if you haven’t listened to a song in awhile, it sounds better. Hmmm, this sounds analogous to something, doesn’t it…”

The last sentence also snagged my attention. “…SRS’s are so cutting edge and elite, they haven’t made their way into the classroom yet.”

-I am about to change that.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in the staff  office checking my email when my co-teacher opened a package. She pulled out three books. One was a English classroom activities book, a TOIC (Test Of English for International Communication) study guide, and then this one, Classroom English Expression Dictionary. I looked at all three, but this one stood out. I skimmed through it and knew i had to have it. My co-teacher said I could borrow if  i wanted to. So I did. Then a couple days later she said, “It’s yours Matt”. A gift. Cool!

The content found in this book is great for SRS sentences. On one side of the page are Korean expressions and on the other are English expressions. I can pick and choose the expressions I like or maybe add a whole section of expressions about reviewing tests, passing out homework, or finding the last place we left off.  There are more than 7000 expressions divided up into five sections. Classroom Management, Teaching English Skills, Teaching Activities, Communication and Interaction, and an appendix that has classroom English for students and useful time based expressions. It’s all in there or just about all in there.

Looking at the English, everything that I can remember the teacher or students saying in the classroom is in this book. And, I verified with my Korean co-teacher, the Korean in this book is genuine classroom talk as well.

This book is perfect timing for me. I’ve  gone through two beginner seasons and an intermediate season of Korean Class 101, and the grammar used in those lessons is also found in this book. There are some new bits but for the most part this is a great book to pull sentences from at this time.

If you are a English teacher in Korea and learning Korean, I highly recommend this. I love it. There are MANY examples using the same words in different ways. It’s real classroom Korean, and I will also note, it’s more than classroom Korean. There’s stuff to be used outside the classroom. ie. “It’s too cold in here!” or “I didn’t catch that.”

This will be a nice source for sentences for a while. Skimming through it, I can see myself adding 90% or more of its content to Anki.

I borrowed a children’s book from the library today. I should say two books really. The title on the front cover is  Good! Very good! and on the back cover it’s Don’t do that! As you might imagine the book is about good and bad behavior. It’s written and illustrated by two Koreans.  It’s a cute look into Korean culture.

I made a discovery this last month. Surrounded by a sea of  ballads and teen-pop, I found this tiny tiny island of K-rock. On it, was  Delispice, the band above,  and a few other ones. I’m still searching for some more.

The progress report on my Korean Language Study Experiments:

Listening: There was definite progress with the first audio blog lesson. Now, when I listen, I understand about 60% percent. It’s better than the 10% when I began.
Reading: Faster, and fast enough to read out loud in a melodic fashion. Yes, I sang. It felt pretty cool, for the first time, to be able to keep up with a couple rock songs in the singing room.
Writing: Not much improvement with the free writing. My writing is only in the form of short messages on the cell phone.
Speaking: See Reading.
Typing: Copying one thousand Korean sentences does wonders for typing speed and now I can type without looking at the keyboard. It’s still really difficult to check for accuracy after I’ve copied something. Misspellings don’t scream out as they do in English. It’s more like a whisper or nothing at all.

Last month I decided that I needed to work on the listening skilz. I took an advanced audio blog from Korean Class 101, chopped it up and added the clips to a new deck. I used it for over a week, noticed some progress, then I gave up on it. It was too much too soon. I haven’t opened that deck for about two weeks. I should go through the deck and delete the offensive content. For the moment though I don’t even want to open it up.

The reviews of the main sentence deck suffered a bit because of the above problem. I reviewed everyday but I got behind. It took me about a week to recover. I started deleting the longer sentences, and sentences that i was just sick of seeing. This really helped me come back and in this final week I began adding new fun sentences, and pulled a nice average of 40 new ones a day.

In the last progress report I wrote that I wanted to learn 5000 sentences in 6 months, but it’s looking like it will probably be around 4000. This is really okay because I will still secretly shoot for 5000 anyway.

I no longer question the effectiveness of SRS. It works and works really well for language learning. The question is now, where else can I use this software?